There were challenges to be faced by the new GranTurismo during its innovative creation. With the new automatic gearbox, the auto-adaptive headlights and the Skyhook suspension system, the Modenese company has employed the most modern technology in order to provide highest levels of comfort and performance.

The space

The coupé body style is not an innovation. The two-door, four-seat coupé is not new to the automotive world, either, for Maserati was one of the founders of the segment in 1946. But the Maserati GranTurismo is the first modern coupé that over-delivers on the visual promise of its sensual body. Inside the doors of the GranTurismo, you find the space of a large, specialist four-seat sedan inside the body of a stunning two-door coupé. Like so much about this car, it offers the best of both worlds, without compromising its strengths to do it.

Almost half a metre longer than the Maserati GranSport, it has delivered far more legroom than the average in this class, plus almost a metre of headroom. Maserati has achieved this by stretching the distance between front and rear wheels, then designing short overhangs at both the front and the rear of the car to maintain its design integrity. Normally, a wheelbase this long would be found in a sedan, with much longer overhangs and at least half a metre more overall length.

The rear seats of a GranTurismo are also designed to be as comfortable as the front seats even over cross-continental journeys, and it has luxury four door sedan touches like sculpted backrests and subtle lighting. But it is not space alone that confirms the GranTurismo’s interior as innovative. The cabin has been divided by a long, crafted central tunnel that feeds down from Maserati’s traditional dashboard vee and continues through to the rear-seat armrest. This innovation gives rear-seat users a sense of their own, individual space.

Length and Strength

Maserati shocked the world with the unique chassis-engineering theme in the breakthrough Quattroporte, and the GranTurismo carries over the stunning sedan’s rear-biased weight distribution. It has achieved this by containing the heaviest and most-critical components of the car – the engine, the gearbox and the differential – between the front and rear axles. This makes the GranTurismo the only car in the class with more than 51 percent of its weight over the rear axle.

To understand why Maserati has gone to great lengths to achieve this, even a brief study of modern Formula One cars or Indy 500 winners will explain it all. They all have more than 60 percent of their mass over the rear axle – and even Maserati’s dominant MC12 FIA GT racing car has this same trait. Having a rear-weight bias gives the GranTurismo a handling, grip and accident-avoidance capability similar to modern racing cars.

Yet, having an ultra-long wheelbase, large wheels and the option of the Skyhook Active ride system means the GranTurismo does not accept racing car compromises to its comfort, luxury and practicality to achieve this on-road poise. While the extra length in the wheelbase guaranteed Maserati had the space to contain the engine behind the front-axle line, it helped that the GranTurismo had one of the most advanced high-performance engines in the world. From just 4.2 litres, the GranTurismo delivers a crushing 405hp. Rivals from BMW and Mercedes-Benz, for example, have much larger engines with considerably less power and, therefore, less efficiency. Its 285km/h top speed is considerably higher than its rivals and it also out-sprints them from 0 to 100km/h (5.2 seconds). So, while it still dominates its rivals on its power, this high-effi ciency engine strategy also gave the GranTurismo an engine that is lighter than the engines in rival coupés. This, in turn, brought enormous benefi ts to the handling and braking prowess of the GranTurismo, without compromising its straight-line performance. The GranTurismo’s engine is coupled to a highly-efficient automatic transmission that sets new standards for performance cars. This transmission is capable of changing gear at up to 7200rpm, and no other automatic transmission in the world is capable of working at higher engine speeds.

Smooth Co-operator

Designing a car to fulfil both the sports-car traditions of Maserati and the luxury demanded by a busy day-to-day life took clever thinking. Most people would not suppose that the GranTurismo’s automatic transmission and its Skyhook active suspension system had a reason to communicate.

One of them is a stunningly smooth and fast gear shifter, capable of coping with higher engine speeds than any other automatic transmission in the world. The other normally keeps the body riding smoothly by making more than 100 decisions about the bumps in the road every second, then instantly altering the stiffness of the suspension to cope. Yet, while the well-proven transmission is one of the smoothest in the world, Maserati’s engineers use the Skyhook system to make the shifts even smoother.
 

The Skyhook system normally runs the car at its softest possible setting, and then stiffens (and, of course, subsequently re-softens) itself to deal with bumps as the wheels roll over them. However, because the sensory data for the Skyhook system and the transmission system end up in the same place, Maserati’s engineers linked the two systems together. The GranTurismo now slightly changes its suspension settings so that the driver feels even less body movement during a gearshift.

But that’s not all it does. Drive with a more sporting intent by pushing the Sport button, and the computers will presume you want to feel more intimately involved in what the car is doing. The gearshift computer will cut 40 percent from the gearshift times, so they are sharper and more urgent. The Skyhook will change its philosophy from supreme ride control to supreme body control, to give you better handling and grip. And, together, they conspire to give a more precise, crisp feel inside the cabin every time you change gear.

Cornering the light market

No other car maker knows more about LED lighting than Maserati. The 3200GT was the first production car in the world to use Light Emitting Diodes (in its famous Boomerang tail lights) and Maserati has built a wealth of LED knowledge since then. This knowledge has culminated in the stunning new rear light design on the GranTurismo.

Each light assembly uses 96 LEDs. Some of them are running lights, some are stop lights and others are used just as turn indicators. The beauty of LEDs is that they illuminate faster and more intensely than conventional bulbs, last longer and use less energy to run as well. While there are seven separate parts in each taillight, another advantage is that nobody will never mistake a GranTurismo in traffic at night. Even from half a mile away, the taillights make it as much of a stand-out performer at night as its Pininfarina body design makes it during the day.

But Maserati’s mastery of lighting does not stop at the GranTurismo’s shapely tail. The GranTurismo also introduces Adaptive Light Control to Maserati. The car’s bi-Xenon lights not only project a brighter, whiter beam than conventional headlights, but they are automatically self-adjusting as well. The lights, though, do not just adjust for height. They are linked (electronically) with the rest of the car’s systems and its computer calculates the car’s speed and its steering angle. When the car is turning at night, the Adaptive Light control swivels the bi-Xenon high- and low-beam unit up to 15 degrees, so GranTurismo drivers can always see what they are turning towards. For safety reasons, the system returns to a conventional, fixed state at speeds above 120km/h. But, unlike LEDs, bi-Xenon lights need to warm up before they are at their most effective, which means they are not terribly effective if you want to fl ash your lights on the motorway. So the GranTurismo’s finely detailed headlight also contains a conventional light, called Flash to Pass, to provide lighting during the day if the bi-Xenon lights are switched off.

The Music Store

If the standard six-speaker GranTurismo audio system is a thing of wonder, then the optional Bose Surround Sound system is a thing of awe. It is not just the number of speakers involved, but where Maserati has located them, the exotic materials they use and even their priority in the GranTurismo’s engineering plans. This sound system was designed into the car from its inception. Obviously, it was a core part of the early discussions on the interior luxury, but it was on the agenda from the earliest engineering and weight distribution discussions as well.

Maserati has long believed that flagship audio quality should be designed in to a car from the start – and the quality of the Quattroporte’s audio is evidence enough! So the Bose Surround Sound system demanded 11 speakers to provide the perfect balance and quality of sound for every occupant of the GranTurismo. Bose developed special Neodymium iron-boron magnets for the GranTurismo’s speakers, with 10 times the energy density of conventional speaker magnets.

These high-performance speakers deliver far better acoustic performance than conventional speakers while being far smaller and far lighter as well. While engineers always strive for lighter weight to help with acceleration, braking, handling and even fuel economy, having smaller speakers also helps to maximize space inside the cabin. It also uses the Bose AudioPilot Noise Compensation Circuitry, which subtly adjusts the sound to compensate for noises from outside the car or even from bumps and tyre noise at higher speeds. From the start of 2008, Maserati will also remove the need for clumsy, fiddly CD stacker changes. Instead, the GranTurismo will introduce an optional USB port so music lovers can load more than 180 hours of songs onto the GranTurismo audio system’s 30GB hard disc drive as well.